A street viewing service is a service that captures images of the scenery surrounding public roads and the like, in order to make these images available online. These services offer a user the ability to traverse through a virtualized view of the real world. Typically image capturing devices mounted on cars and potentially other modes of travel such as bicycles, etc., are used to systematically gather multiple images of the scenery surrounding the roads running throughout some part of the world, such as a given town, city, county, state or even a whole country. To build the virtualized view, adjacent ones of the gathered images are “stitched” together using known panoramic image processing techniques. Typically this virtualized view is made available online (via the Internet).
For example, each image captured by an image-gathering car of the street viewing service is typically linked to respective location data recording the location at which the image was captured, e.g. in terms of GPS coordinates, and this location data may in turn be linked to a map of an online mapping service. This allows the virtualized view to be made accessible through the mapping service as a front-end. The user can then access the virtualized view by accessing the mapping service through a browser or a dedicated app running on his or her smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, or the like. E.g. the user may drag and drop an icon onto a particular position on a street shown on an online map, and in response the online service then presents the user with a navigable virtual view of the surroundings starting from the selected position. Further, the location data allows additional information to be added in the virtualized view, for example as an overlay image. Currently this is used for showing the user the coordinates at which the image was taken, and for showing the street address or name of a building visible in the image.
In various jurisdictions, privacy and other regulations apply requiring images of, for example, license plates and faces to be blurred. Hence to comply with various privacy regulations in such jurisdictions, the images are processed to automatically detect license plates and faces and blur these. Also, for state security and other reasons certain buildings or details will not be captured or will be deleted at a later stage based on a manual request. In addition, users can request that elements in the virtualized view are censored or removed. An example would be the parents of a murdered child whose dead body was visible in the street viewing service, or sunbathers who in their gated backyard where not visible from eye level but were captured by the elevated camera on the image-gathering car, etc.
To remove or blur objects in the virtualized view of the street viewing service, images can be automatically analysed to detect certain predetermined types of objects such as license plates and human faces. Also, images can be manually reviewed and censored, or images can be marked as censored based on metadata such as the location (e.g. based on captured GPS coordinates), such that the service automatically obscures or removes any images associated with the relevant metadata.